by Christopher Barr
“There is no
reality except the one contained within us.
That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality
and never allow the world within to assert itself.”
– Hermann Hesse
“…humankind
cannot bear very much reality.”
– T.S. Eliot
Collateral is a superb Los Angeles crime thriller, a film by the always
assiduous Michael Mann, save the film adaptation of Miami Vice, one
of the great American directing auteurs of his generation. The film opens
in a crowded airport when the antagonist walks sharply through the chaos of
traveling people with the ease and confidence of a great white shark.
Vincent sports silver hair and a gray suit transforming
himself into a blend of urban camouflage; he is a representation of the modern
technological age, the color of metal and as cold as steel. His humanity
is entirely stripped from him and all that is left is a symbolic machine, a meticulous
killing machine. Vincent bumps into a man walking by, both men look at
each other. Vincent, wearing black sunglasses, giving him shark eyes of
sorts, picks up that man’s case and walks away while no one in the airport
notices their little pass off as Vincent forges on, a man on mission.
Max is a taxi driver, a man that keeps his cab clean and
organized before he begins his shift. He places a picture in his overhead
visor of a gorgeous island with a sandy beach surrounding it, that’s his place
of Zen, his pictorial mantra that he glances up at when his passengers irritate
him. Max is a city dweller that keeps to his routines to avoid change.
Change has always been an Achilles heel of most people, it
instigates alteration, and it motivates precarious movement. Change often
means growth which sometimes requires courage. Change to most people, is
the enemy of safety, and that’s what people want - to be safe. Safe in
their cozy bubble, in Max’s case, that bubble is his taxi cab. It’s his
domain even if the world around him is in a hurry, here in the cab, he can
control.
Losing control is the biggest fear of all, that’s what
people avoid, that’s why many of us avoid change and thus avoid growth, so we
can maintain what little control we have over this chaotic jungle of a society
we inhabit. This is not necessarily a
bad thing, most people want to live, so maintaining control and fearing change
because what it bring is understandable.
The problem is what we have to give up in order to be safe, which
paradoxical is some ways because in order to survive we have to avoid the
requirements of a sustainable fulfilling existence. A key component of this is giving control
over to change in order to realize to discoveries.
Max picks up Annie, a beautiful young career woman that
immediately gives off the impression of strength. A good kind of strength
rather than an overbearing one where it is only masking fear, she’s a confident
woman that Max instantly falls for. He impresses her with his knowledge
of the intricacies of the city routes before telling her about his business
plan. A Limo Company, which he claims must be ‘perfect’, called Island
Limos where he claims people, will feel like they are on a luxurious island.
This island motif is clearly Max’s psychological daily struggle
he has when engaging the world. The island is a prison cell that he’s
glamorized in his mind so he is able to live with the fact that he’s scared to
death of taking a chance at something. He’s clearly a guy that desires
change but he is also mentally paralyzed to do anything about it.
Max guesses that Annie is a lawyer by the way she is
dressed and her bag. She continues to be impressed by Max as she tells
him that she’s a prosecutor working on a big case. She tells him that it is
stressful and challenging, and then Max gives her his paradise island picture
to help her get “harmonic”, to help her relax. She exits the cab and
gives Max her business card and then walks into a building.
Vincent exits that same building, passing Annie and gets
into Max’s cab. Vincent and Max talk briefly about route times and about
how LA is too sprawled out, too disconnected.
Vincent then tells Max about a guy who got on the subway in LA and died
and for six hours travelled around the city before anyone noticed.
Apathy in the city is unfortunately part of daily life
because of all the difference, all the cultures living under one smoggy
roof. Instead of learning about these differences, most people, fearing
change, chose to push it out of their mind to the point of indifference.
In the concrete jungle, the animals become distant and quite picky about who
they spend their precious time with, and this may sound cynical but most people
in the city could give a shit if people out of their “know” lived all their
lives or jumped in front of a subway and killed themselves.
Max tells Vincent about his business plan and that this
cab gig is just part time, until he gets his dream off its feet. He then
tells him that he’s been a cabbie for 12 years. You can tell that Vincent
knows that Max is full of shit, regardless, Vincent remarks that Max is one of
those guy’s that “do” and not one of the one’s that “talk”.
This very thing is a problem that seems to be everywhere,
people that talk the talk, but in the end, don’t “do” anything but talk.
This is a result of an arrested population of people that are dreamers while
governments regulate most of their lives through various forms of control.
They arrive at Vincent’s stop when he offers Max six
hundred dollars to stick with him for the night, so he can make a couple of
stops before heading to LAX. Max hesitates understandably because this is
different, Max needs to acclimate to it, like most things that alter his routine.
Max finally agrees to do it as Vincent exits the car, giving Max three hundred dollars
up front.
Max pulls over to the side of the building, and glances
through a booklet on a brand new Mercedes Benz, clearly a dream car. He
eats a sandwich when out of the blue; a body crashes down on his car, smashing
his windshield. Max freaks out and soon discovers that it was Vincent who
killed him.
Here Vincent becomes Max’s very own encounter with the
Real, where his bubble is broken, literally and figuratively. Vincent
forces Max to carry on driving him and thus forces Max to live outside his
fantasy world and into the real world of danger.
Vincent tells Max the last thing he wants to hear after he
figures out that Vincent is out on a killing spree; Vincent tells Max that he’s
going to have to leave his comfort zone, “Okay, look, here’s the
deal. Man, you were gonna drive me around tonight, never be the wiser,
but El Gordo got in front of a window, did his high dive, we’re into Plan
B. Still breathing? Now we gotta make the best of it, improvise,
adapt to the environment, Darwin, shit happens, I Ching, whatever man, we gotta
roll with it.”
“The superior man
perseveres long in his course, adapts to the times, but remains firm in his
direction and correct in his goals.”
– I Ching
Vincent poses an interesting perspective, or
rationalization, about Max’s concern for death that occurs in his own
surroundings versus the genocide in Rwanda, or the mass killings in Japan
during World War 2 as a result of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being strategically bombed.
Vincent is suggesting that our concern about death is subjective and generally,
for most people, never objective. But yet death occurs in the real world
and isn’t subjective until the living attempt to apply meaning to it.
Essentially the hypocrisy here is that death isn’t really about the person who
died, but rather about the living person who is around when it happened.
People often turn another person’s unfortunate death around and somehow make it
is all about themselves.
Vincent takes out his second target while Max is tied up
and being robbed by a couple of thugs down in an alleyway. Vincent shoots
the two thugs, point blank, and gets his brief case and Max’s wallet. Max
is still pursuing his ‘flight’ instinct and is thus causing Vincent to kill
people that otherwise wouldn’t have to die.
Vincent and Max go to a jazz bar while detectives try and
figure out what’s going on with the murders. Vincent is metaphorically Jazz,
he’s off melody, behind the notes, not what’s expected and not surprisingly, Max
doesn’t like Jazz for that very reason. Vincent points out that most
people, ten years from now, will have the same job and the same life, but with
them, doing what they are doing, they won’t know where they’ll be ten minutes
from now.
Vincent and Max talk to a Jazz musician about meeting the
great trumpet player Miles Davis. Here we get another story about a man
who had opportunities, he had chances to ‘make’ something of himself and it all
blew by him, days to weeks, weeks to years, years to forgotten. Now he
does what Max does, he talks and doesn’t “do”. Then Vincent kills him
after he fails to answer a pivotal question about Miles Davis and where he
studied music. He was Vincent’s third target all along and Max didn’t even
know it.
While Max and Vincent visit Max’s mother in the hospital,
Vincent finds out that his mother thinks her son runs his own limo
company. Max is angered by his lie revealed and takes Vincent’s
briefcase, running out of the hospital with it and before Vincent catches him,
he throws the case over a safety railing on a pedway, over a freeway where a
transport truck hits and destroys it. This naturally pisses Vincent off
but he’s also impressed that Max showed a different side of himself.
Here we begin to see that Vincent, in spite of himself,
cares about Max, he cares about this cage that Max has built around himself to
keep safe. Vincent becomes an unsuspecting guru of sorts to Max’s
sluggish pupil.
Vincent asks about why Max lied to his mother, he asks
about his so-called limo company. Max runs down a list of excuses as to
why it’s not off the ground yet and then says that it has to be perfect, in
other words, it has to remain in the fantasy world of the mind so it can stay
perfect. If he actually attempts it and fails then he’ll have nothing to fantasize
about in his safe little bubble, so he keeps pushing it off.
Vincent is quite the opposite; he lives too much in the
real world that he’s become detached from humanity. He pretty well sees
everything as it is, without all the sugar coating and re-imagining that most
people apply to reality. As a result, Vincent is like the shark that
can’t stop moving or he’ll die, he’s a man without a dream, he’s a man without
any form of hope for the future. Vincent is a true product of the modern
age, a manufactured assassin. On some levels, Vincent is reality
in all its blood and death.
The Buddha went on a six year pilgrimage and finally after attempting
to understand what it is to be alive, while sitting and mediating under the Bodhi
tree in Bodhgaya, Northern India for 49 days, Siddhartha Gautama awakened to an
eternal present and thus becoming the ‘Enlightened One’. What the Buddha discovered here was the
ordinary, everyday person either lived in the past or in the future but not in
the present. The Buddha aimed to only
live in the present and thus cleansed himself of his past and laid waste of
dreams of the future. What made this man
so profoundly unique is the mental discipline that was required for him to
arrive at such a revelation. At a
glance, while untrained, this might look obvious but one would be hard pressed
to find a person that was able to cut all the baggage from their past, that
quite literally defines most people, and remove it, or rather properly compartmentalize
it.
Most people live in the past and not the present, and those that don’t
readily live in the past, dream of a future where their lives are better in
some way, usually resulting in them getting more things and more money. Or dreams of living among people that one can
control better to make life easier. It’s
hard to truly comprehend what it must have taken for the Buddha to achieve this
level of understanding of his own mental faculties.
Max is living in the future, a man that dreams of a ‘perfect’ business
where he believes he will find fulfilment. Certainly not comparing Vincent to the Buddha,
but they both do have one thing in common, and that one thing is what Vincent
finally teaches Max, and that it to live in the present. Max is a dreamer, but more tragically, he’s
not actually living a life, he is merely existing while surviving the chaos of
the world around him. He’s suffering
self-deception, like most people, he is miles away from reality, while his
basic motor skills and daily duties are being fulfilled, he spirit is not.
Self-delusion is a malediction that we all suffer from. We alter reality and rewrite it to suit our
subjective experience we choose to perceive, and when I say choose I don’t mean
consciously rebuilding reality; I mean to say that this is part of our hard
wiring in the sub-structures of the mind.
Naïve realism is what the resulting delusion becomes, our very own
perception of reality, which is unique to us.
Our brains constantly mislead us into believing almost anything other
than what is real, in the world without us.
We trust our brains for the most part because that’s all we know to
trust. Everything comes from the brain, even
if one looks down at their leg and believes they see their leg out there in the
world. The computational effort that is required
to come to such a conclusion was worked in
the brain. Everything is relayed back
into your brain, deconstructed and then reconstructed in your image, what
remains is discarded but never lost.
The FBI and police detectives suspect Max’s cab outside of
a night club as the cab they are looking for. Max had to go inside to get
Vincent a new list because of the previous getting destroyed on the
freeway. Max meets with Felix, the man that Vincent is killing for, a man
that has never actually met Vincent. Felix believes Max is Vincent as he
expresses how furious he is over the list being lost, forcing Max into a corner.
Rather than running, Max for the first time in the film, stands
his ground, like the Narrator in Fightclub, Max starts to talk and
sound like Vincent, the Tyler Durden of their opposing personalities. Max
succeeds and gets the list out to the cab to Vincent and they drive off to
Vincent’s next target. It turns out Vincent’s been contracted to kill
witness’ that are turning state’s evidence against Felix to save themselves
from going to jail.
On their way to a Nightclub called Fever, where Vincent
eventually kills his forth target during a massive joint FBI, LAPD shootout,
Vincent encourages Max to call Annie, the prosecutor he got the number from in
the opening scenes of the film. Vincent reminds Max that life is short
and that he should take the chance. Vincent knows he’s done, but his
glimmer of hope now lies in Max, who starts to become a fantasy that Vincent
starts to have about living a normal life. He nurtures his new found
fantasy by helping Max see his potential; he also likes the idea of not being
alone.
Vincent has become a drifting wolf in the night, roaming
from kill to kill and in between just existing. He explains that there in
a galaxy with millions of stars and they are on one of them, he sees life as
meaningless. He has all the tendencies of someone who wants to commit
suicide but projects them outward into the world. He’s on an existential,
extroverted rampage of disappointment toward the reality and lack of meaning to
his own life.
Max asks Vincent what wrong with him? He figures
there must be a wire loose because the parts that are supposed to be built goodness
into people, he doesn’t possess. Max sees Vincent’s lack of empathy; he
sees that Vincent is dead inside, a sociopath. Vincent wants to know why
he didn’t start his business, why is he still driving a taxi. He tells
Max that he isn’t going to call that girl and he isn’t going to start his
company. He says it was all a dream and that one day Max’s going to wake
up and he will be old and it will never have happened.
Max speeds the taxi up as Vincent illuminates him on the
fact that he’s a loser and will always be one. Max reminds Vincent that,
according to him, everything is insignificant anyway so the hell with it.
Max is waking up out of his inactive slumber and taking back control of his own
life. As a result, Max crashes the taxi against a guardrail and flips it
down an empty street, smashing it against a row of parked cars. Max
sacrificed himself in order to live again, to start new as a man experiencing
an awakening.
The police show up and Vincent escapes the wreckage of the
car and runs off. Max gets arrested at the crash but sees that Annie, the
prosecutor is Vincent’s last target so he gets the upper hand and cuffs the cop
to a pole and runs after Vincent. Max is facing his fears and embracing
change not only for the sake his own life by for Annie’s as well.
Max arrives at Annie’s building where Vincent is ready to
kill her, then Max intervenes and shoots Vincent wounding him as he and Annie
run away. Max and Vincent’s showdown ends on a subway car with Vincent
fatally wounded. He reminds Max about the man that died on the subway and
travelled around the city for six hours before anyone noticed him, then he
dies, and Max and Annie walk out during the dawn of a new day.
Collateral was a commentary on detachment in society, on
how people have forgot how to be humane to one another. It’s also a film
about rising up out of the decadence of society and taking back one’s humanity
even if no one else is willing to.
Collateral is about survival, and how so many people live their whole
lives without waking up to the fact there is so much more to it. Max killed the wolf, he killed the shark, so
that he could live again, without living with fear.
“Change proves true on
the day it is finished.”
– I Ching
Boyhood is a coming-of-age story about
family and adaptation. It’s about
conformity and regret as well as life in America. The film was shot over a 12 year period with
the same principle cast. Richard
Linklater’s opus, as a result, is a fascinating unique film, a film like no
other. It is wonderfully intimate, while
simultaneously technical, in its Tolstoy-esque scope of life and the search for
meaning as one grows up in another man’s ready-made society.
Boyhood is truly one of the great poems on
film in years; it captures, through a sociological and psychological experiment,
the vastness of the human condition.
This film has no fat, it is as honest a film as one is going to get,
with magnificent performances by the young actors as well as the older ones,
the directing was engaging and in some places, documentary-like, capturing nuance and banality in interesting ways.
The story
focuses around young six year old Mason Jr. as he goes from grade one all the
way through to grade 12, graduating and then finally going off to college at
the age of 18. The film is a bit of
sociological tragedy as it explores the barriers that Mason endures while
trying to find his voice in the world.
Most of the adults in the film suppress his possibilities one way or
another, telling him to fall in line with everyone else in order to be
successful in life. They lament over
their own short-comings, their own failures and do what too many adults do;
they drag the young down with them.
Their inability to except that they so-called failed what society
expected of them, they psychologically sabotage anyone else from succeeding to
avoid confronting the reality of their own disappointments.
The film did
go through the pluses and minuses of education, it explored natural versus
indoctrinating forms of learning, where Mason was presented, confronted and in
some cases forced to choose sides. Here
the film exposed the child abuse society inflicts on young impressionable minds,
how young people are in many cases enforced to comply with their ruling adults’
often destructive ways at looking at the world.
This system is in place to beat the will of freedom out of the young to
prepare them for the workforce, so the power structure can maintain servants
for their property and money gathering apparatuses. 
The film did
deal with the ambivalence of freedom; it explored actual consequences in
society if we were all able to be free. Metaphysics
philosopher Thomas “Man is a Machine” Hobbes saw the devastating effects on
humanity without the safety and comforting walls that civilization provide, he
saw life in the hypothetical natural state as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish,
and short.” He felt that humanity is
instinctively self-interested and self-serving; to his credit we simply need to
turn on the television on to see how this has come to pass. Hobbes felt that civilization is necessary to
place restrictions on these instincts.
For him, keeping people in line was the only way for humanity to build a
future for itself.
Rousseau
borrowed the idea of the Social Contract proposed by Hobbes and refined by
empirical philosopher John Locke.
Rousseau saw the inequalities and injustices in society all too well, he
saw growing social unrest and unlike Hobbes, he was less pessimistic about the
natural state of things, his rallying cry of “back to nature!” as something
desirable and not brutal was a vital part of the Romantic movement in
literature. “Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains.” - was Rousseau’s
challenging declaration at the beginning of his most influential work, The Social Contract. Rousseau’s book asked for a restructuring to
a more alternative civil society where the church, the monarchy and the
aristocrats would no longer be in power, he felt that the business of legislation
should be for all citizens to participate in. This new social contract could promote
freedom through law.
This recalls
a scene from Pleasantville where Toby
Maguire’s character, David arrives back out of the TV from the 1950’s television
show to find his mother crying in the kitchen.
She tells him that life, her life wasn’t supposed to happen this way, assuming
here that her, along with Mason’s mother Olivia was, involuntarily traversing
the fantasy of the beautiful big house with the white picket fence, the perfect
husband, the 2.5 loving, grateful children and the family dog to the real
world, a world of war and angst, of struggle and let downs. David’s mother in Pleasantville says essentially that these real struggles in life ‘weren’t
supposed to happen to her’ to which David informs her that nothing is supposed
to happen, certainly not in any fate or preordained sense. Life is a struggle because one has to make
their own way in it, the rest of the stuff about the perfect family and fantasy
home is a dream the American government, along with their corporate sponsorship
with money hungry conglomerate companies, disseminate to manufacture hope as
they brainwash the youth of their country to grow up and become obedient
compliers, and everlasting consumers of their products.
